Pearl River      Jim Lynch, a one-time ACORN staffer back in the day and a long-time KABF board member, sent me the obituary in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette on Pat House’s passing at 94 years of age.  Pat was a long-time comrade and friend of our organizations back to the very beginning in 1970 and for many decades afterwards.

Knowing Pat over the years, I would be shocked if she didn’t approve of every word written in her obituary.  I was pleased that it mentioned her contributions to ACORN from its earliest days in Arkansas, as well as the fact that she was chair of the Arkansas Broadcasting Foundation when KABF 88.3 went on the air at 100,000-watts in 1984, a position she held for many, many years.  Prominently as well was inclusion of her involvement and leadership within the Women’s Emergency Committee, which was central to the fight to reopen the schools after then Governor Orval Faubus stood in the way, forcing President Eisenhower to send the National Guard to ensure integration in 1957.  There was mention too that she worked from 1967 to 1971 to get Winthrop Rockefeller elected as governor, seeing him win in ’66, re-elected in ’68, and losing to Dale Bumpers in 1970, but in that case, if anything, her role was understated.

Pat didn’t work out of anything resembling a Rockefeller campaign office.  She had a nondescript office of sorts not far from the county courthouse in downtown Little Rock.  I have forgotten what she called her operation, but independent voters or something along that line sticks in my mind.  Key to Rockefeller’s elections was his outreach and appeal to Black voters, and Pat was the key to registration and outreach, propelled by her disdain for Faubus.  She coordinated a vast statewide network to support Black churches and their pastors in that effort, and dealt with them daily, while funding their efforts.

I had met Pat through her best friend at the time, Mamie Ruth Williams, another WEC veteran.  Hearing that Pat was somehow involved in voter registration, Mamie Ruth suggested I go meet with her.  Naïve and barely 22 with ACORN hardly four months old, I reached out to her by phone and stumbled through a proposal to do what I called a “one-two punch,” an action of forcing the school district to use Title I money to provide free books in Little Rock, where we would then bus everyone to the county courthouse, where you were required to register then.  I went to her office and made my pitch, asking her to think about it, and got up to leave.  Pat stopped me and said, “Don’t forget that bag.”  I was querulous, but did as she said and grabbed the brown paper bag and left her office.  When I got to my car, I opened it and there was more than one-thousand dollars in cash inside to pay for the buses and more.  It’s fair to say that Pat was ACORN’s first donor.  We used the money to pay for those flyers and buses for the action and voter registration, but also to rent a cheap storefront at 1313 Woodrow Street, not far from Central High School as ACORN’s first office.   Pat and I never discussed that exchange, but I never forgot it and how important it was to ACORN’s survival at the time.

Pat was inscrutable.  Conversations were short and often elliptical, but I trusted her completely, as she did me.  Her travel agency was our travel agency back in those pre-internet days.  When she worked for an accounting firm, their accountants were our auditors.  I had lost touch with her over the last fifteen years, when I’ve been more regularly in Arkansas with KABF and Local 100. She was a wonderful friend and a great supporter of ACORN and its family of organizations, and those bonds never break.